5/12/98
ATHENS, Ohio -- Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, will speak at Ohio University's Forum Theater at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, May 20. Soyinka, the Robert Woodruff Professor of Arts at Emory University in Atlanta, will present "Cultural Relativism and Human Values" as a part of the Kennedy Lecture Series.
Soyinka, who is regarded by many as Africa's greatest writer and one of the world's most important dramatists, is a native of Nigeria who has been living in exile in the United States and Europe since November 1994. Threatened by his nonviolent opposition activities, the totalitarian government of Nigeria placed him under surveillance, confiscated his passport and prohibited the selling of his books or biographical materials. He fled his native land in 1994, and was charged with treason by the Nigerian government in March 1997. Currently, he is protected by Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights regarding his right to freedom of expression and association.
His ability to capture African life in his writing, including a collection of essays entitled Myth, Literature and the African World and several plays, has been likened to Shakespeare's ability to capture the Elizabethan drama of England. The Nobel Prize committee that announced his 1986 award described his literary works as "vivid, often harrowing, but (they) are also marked by an evocative, poetically intensified diction. Soyinka has been characterized as one of the finest poetical playwrights that have written in English."
A particularly powerful collection of his poems, called A Shuttle in the Crypt, was written during Soyinka's two years in prison, where he was sent because of his attitude during his country's civil war. The poems are about mental survival, human contact, anger and forgiveness.
Soyinka, who until recently taught at Harvard, blends eloquence, satire, wit and poetry into his works. In his most recent book, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, Soyinka describes his exit from his native country as "my Rambo' departure from the Nigerian nation space.'"
Soyinka's visit to Ohio University is sponsored by the Kennedy Lecture Committee, the African Studies Program, the Contemporary History Institute, the School of Theater and the College of Education.